Why North Korea Gave Up on Korea Reunification?

For decades, Pyongyang insisted that South Koreans were misguided compatriots waiting to be liberated–until the moment when the puppet state became much richer and successfully, too difficult to smear it as an oppressed colonial wasteland with a straight face. In this episode, we investigate how North Korea went from treating Korean reunification as a sacred national mission to dissolving its reunification agencies and officially declaring South Korea a hostile foreign state. To understand the change, we return to the improvised division of Korea in 1945, Kim Il Sung’s disastrous attempt to reunify the peninsula by force, the Korean War, the propaganda “peace offensives” of the 1950s, the commando raids of the 1960s, and the deeply sincere peace negotiations of the 1970s, conducted by two dictators while both quietly strengthened their police states. This is the story of how reunification evolved from military conquest into ideological scripture, diplomatic theater, and finally a dangerous embarrassment. The dream remained eternal, right up until the Supreme Leader ordered it removed from the constitution. Subscribe, unless you’re busy reading the new DPRK constitution. OP Song: Our Wish Is Unification ED Song: We Are One Reference: Armstrong, Charles K. The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Choi, Lyong. “Reluctant Reconciliation: South Korea’s Tentative Détente with North Korea in the Nixon Era, 1969–72.” Modern Asian Studies 54, no. 1 (2020): 59–94. Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981–1990. Shen, Zhihua. Mao, Stalin, and the Korean War: Trilateral Communist Relations in the 1950s. Translated by Neil Silver. London: Routledge, 2012. Shen, Zhihua, and Yafeng Xia. A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949–1976. Revised and corrected edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Szalontai, Balázs. Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953–1964. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 04:47 A National Divorce 13:37 Reunification by Force 23:13 Peace Offensives! 38:43 A Communique 48:04 Final Reflections